MEPs quiz institutions on financial interests…

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

1/31/07, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 8:41 PM CET

The Parliament’s budgetary control committee was this week (29 January) asking questions about the procedures of other EU institutions. The MEPs had the impertinence to ask whether judges of the European Court of Justice had got round to declaring their financial interests. The court responded that “the members of the institution have agreed to set up among themselves a working group with the task of conducting a study of the advisability of drawing up a code of conduct applicable to them and of the contents of any such code”. Which roughly translates as: don’t hold your breath.The European Court of Auditors, supposedly the scourge of bad practice elsewhere, takes a different line on financial interests: “Members of the court communicate a declaration of their financial interests and other patrimony to the president of the court, who keeps them under confidential custody…These declarations are not published.” It would be churlish to point out that the president of the court is elected by the members.

There is something splendidly parochial about the state-aid investigation launched last week by the European Commission’s competition department into JC Decaux, a French advertising company. The question …